Philip
Cunningham says whether or not 10,000 is an accurate account of the
number killed at the Tiananmen uprising, we know the crackdown was
horrific and that Beijing won’t give a clear account
PUBLISHED IN SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST:
Thursday, 28 December, 2017
A newly declassified British telegram suggests that the death toll in the Tiananmen crackdown
was worse than realised. Relying on a high-level Chinese source, the
intelligence document cites “at least 10,000 dead” and some 40,000
injured. Stories of gratuitous violence are included in the report,
written after the tragedy by the then British ambassador to China, Alan
Donald.
This unexpected exposure nearly three decades after the fact raises questions about Beijing’s failure to come to terms
with what it knows about what happened in 1989. Party apologists
testily acknowledge a death toll in the low hundreds and perversely pin
China’s economic success on the crackdown, while cruelly blaming the
victims of violence for the trouble.
So, how many people died?
Journalistic estimates based on hodgepodge
fact-collecting in the heat of the moment buttressed by painstaking
research point to more than a thousand, but it is difficult to document
beyond that.
I freelanced with the BBC
during the 1989 crisis, hired for Mikhail Gorbachev’s Beijing visit,
but soon the state visit became a sideshow to the peaceful occupation of Tiananmen
and I got busier than I bargained for, spending every day and many
nights on the square, from the time of the hunger strike in mid-May to
the early hours of June 4. I was with a BBC TV crew when troops broke
into downtown Beijing, and was on the square, not far from the Goddess of Democracy, when the first armoured military vehicles buzzed the crowd and pandemonium broke loose.
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The news information I helped gather as a
translator and field producer for my British colleagues has some bearing
on Donald’s dire assessment, because BBC was on the front line and
shared information with British diplomats.
Ten thousand is a shocking figure, and needs to
be viewed with some scepticism. In Chinese, it is not the kind of number
meant to be taken literally in most contexts, for in addition to being a
mathematical unit of measurement, wa n is also a poetic and somewhat clichéd way of describing anything great in magnitude.
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Since China was on the edge of civil war at the
time, at least according to diplomatic insiders, one could picture a
scenario where an official in opposition to the ruling clique might
exaggerate or use florid language.
One of the most successful propaganda coups of
Deng Xiaoping’s regime was the claim, reluctantly corroborated
afterwards by dissidents and journalists, that no one died on Tiananmen
Square proper. Late Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo
and musician Hou Dejian were among eyewitnesses attesting to this.
Standing their ground courageously with the last student holdouts on the
square; they were permitted a peaceful evacuation from the central
obelisk at daybreak.
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There was no shortage of blood-curdling killing,
but it took place mostly on Changan Boulevard and nearby side streets.
Since “Tiananmen” became shorthand for Western reporting on the
massacre, the government’s counterclaim has effectively derailed
discussion. The “no one died” reasoning is odious even if technically
true; it callously trivialises those killed elsewhere.
For the record, the BBC crew and I witnessed the
early stages of the crackdown, some of it caught on camera, and while
we were convinced that something terrible was happening on the square
around 4am when the lights went out and smoke rose high, we were too far
to see and it was too dark to film. While on the ground, we did see
tanks in battle with the crowd, heard constant gunfire, saw tracer
bullets overhead and crumpled, bloodied bodies being carted away by
brave civilians. But we did not see a massacre, nor was there any sign
of one at the intersection of Zhengyi Road, just across from the Beijing
Hotel, which is mentioned in the secret communiqué as a killing zone.
Then again, it was later reported that a sniper shot someone in the room
next door to us and we didn’t see that, either.
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In short, the crackdown was criminal,
unnecessary and thuggish, forever wrong and it will never be right. Even
Beijing’s lowball estimates are horrifying.
Is 10,000 possible? Perhaps. Beijing authorities
are best positioned to answer this, but they protest rather too loudly
any time the topic comes up. The blanket censorship and bizarre denials
are rooted in insecurity, arrogance and fear of exposure.
Philip J. Cunningham is the author of Tiananmen Moon
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Is 10,000 dead the truth about Tiananmen?